All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

On 16 August 2012 near Marikana, South Africa, striking miners from the Lonmin company were fired on by police, resulting in 34 deaths. The heart of this book is a series of interviews with strikers, most of them recorded on “the mountain” close to where their comrades were killed. Also includes a narrative and analysis by Peter Alexander of the University of Johannesburg.

“The book provides a bottom-up account of the Marikana story, to correct an imbalance in many official and media accounts that privilege the viewpoints of governments and business, at the expense of workers.” Professor Jane Duncan, chair of Media and Information Studies at Rhodes University

“Well written, extremely scrupulous in its research and forceful in its argument.” Professor John Saul, Canadian political scientist, one of the world’s top experts on liberation struggle in Southern Africa

***Out now from Redwords***

Poems of Protest by William Morris

with an introduction by Michael Rosen

978 1 909026 05 6

£6.99 SPECIAL OFFER £5

Though most know him for his design work, William Morris was also an accomplished writer whose poetry was used as songs and chants for the socialist movement. This volume includes work that has not been published since first appearing as propaganda in The Commonweal, the paper of Morris’s Socialist League. Michael Rosen argues that his socialist poetry was part of a long tradition of protest writing and a signpost for future struggles.

Also included are “How I Became a Socialist” by William Morris and an afterword, “The Communist Poet-Laureate” by the Morris scholar Nicholas Salmon.

Crossing the ‘river of fire’: the socialism of William Morris

by Hassan Mahamdallie

978 1 909026 04 9

£9.99 SPECIAL OFFER £8

The ravages of industrial capitalism, imperialism and war, the destruction of the environment and above all, the enslavement of human labour to the machine, appalled William Morris. Hassan Mahamdallie shows that the socialism of Morris grew out of his view of the past and his hatred for a system of “shoddy” production and that during the last decades of his life he threw all his energy into the struggle to change the world.

Shostakovich: Socialism, Stalin & Symphonies

by Simon Behrman

9781905192663

£9.99 SPECIAL OFFER £8

His struggle to maintain artistic integrity as the Russian Revolution was replaced by a cruel dictatorship made Shostakovich a tragic figure, but also a hero to his contemporaries, fellow musicians and audience. This book describes the importance of Shostakovich in transcending the artificial divide between popular and classical music.